Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades Read online

  Lacey finished the explanation of Ayan’s first night with Liam, she’d heard it enough to have it memorized. “He was the most trustworthy person left in your life then, and you needed to feel alive and cared for.” Lacey didn’t state it sardonically, but surprised Ayan when she added her own opinion. “Bully for him, being at the catcher’s post at the right time. Old letch should have put you off just the same. Figure someone of morally high training could have kept his robes on.”

  “I’m just as much to blame,” Ayan said. “Takes two.”

  “You were reeling in grief, two important people snatched away in just a few days. Even I know you wouldn’t be yourself. Wish I was there instead of him then, I’d know well enough to put you to bed and cuddle you off instead of getting into your pants at the first opening. I just can’t believe how it ended, him fighting to keep you on his arm after both of you drifted apart for a couple of months. He had to know it all started wrong, I know that’s how you felt.”

  “You were there when the real grief struck,” Ayan reassured Lacey. “When I didn’t expect it, and you wouldn’t leave, not even when I told you to.”

  “We’re on equal ground, little dove. When my brother was found, you were my pillar even though it would have been fine for you to go on like I were just a serving bot. You could have just left me in my place to feel the loss on my own time.”

  “Couldn’t do that. You know you’re more than my aide.” It was true; Lacey quickly became the older sister she never knew she needed. “I don’t know what these last months would be like without you.” Ayan took Lacey’s slender hand and squeezed it. For a moment they shared a quiet time of acknowledgement and affection. “As for the mess with Jake, you know the whole story now.”

  “Thank you. I was sorry for asking, I know you want to move on, but-“

  “Your curiosity was begging,” Ayan said. “I understand.”

  “Well, I’m glad your time with Liam is sorted, now he’s just a face at the other end of the Council table, and you can move on.” Lacey said. “Or move back to Jake?” she asked with a wink. “I know you’re abreast of all the Warlord’s doings – well, whatever crumbs of data they leave for the public and what you can get from Triton Fleet.”

  “There’s a long distance to cross if that were to happen. I hurt him, I know I did, and if I didn’t, Minh made sure I knew it. Aside from all that, sometimes I’m amazed at what you catch me doing. You’re not hacked into my comms, are you?” Ayan asked.

  “I wouldn’t know how to, and a good aide shouldn’t have to. I know everything about you, dear. How else am I supposed to know what you need before you do?”

  “Speaking of which,” Ayan said, “have you heard anything that could tell you what this is about?”

  “No, and neither has Victor. No one else replied when I asked what was going on. They know you have a tight schedule. If this is more bureaucratic haggling, I’m going to start stunning people.”

  It took a while for Ayan to get used to Lacey’s humour, but once she did, it never failed to amuse. She could be the picture of professional decorum, but every once in a while her temper got the best of her, and she’d let loose with threats and sabre rattling that was only a good way for her to quickly blow off steam before she had to face people again. It was often just what Ayan needed to start smiling again.

  CHAPTER 4

  Haven Shore

  Alice’s report to the Haven Shore Strategic Centre was filed in-flight. Her duties were fulfilled, and there was still a little light left in the day. The crewmembers of the Warlord who remained behind while the ship was on an intelligence gathering mission and many Haven Shore residents were taking a day off at the beach. After the last few hours of the long day on Tamber, the terraformed moon would be overshadowed by its brother moon and the planet it orbited, Kambis.

  Alice enjoyed hanging out with Ashley, the sometimes bubbly, and often underestimated pilot. Even though she had the intelligence and experience to plan ahead when it came to her duties, Ashley was a great example of someone who enjoyed living in the moment, and she made every moment she could enjoyable.

  Alice had gotten to know nearly all of the other Warlord crewmembers as well, and liked most of them. Work on the ship was nearing completion, and even though she’d spent much of her time as a ranger, she couldn’t help but be proud of how it was turning out. The restoration seemed to take forever with so few people working on it, but months of ceaseless labour and good teamwork yielded undeniable results. The addition of a British Shipwright Crew in the last two months accelerated the work more than anyone expected, especially her. Every time the Warlord returned to the system it seemed like a whole section of the ship’s interior was brand new.

  When the ship was ready, Alice would be have to make a decistion: remain on Tamber and serve the Rangers, a new organization that she learned so much from, or go off-world with her father.

  It was a difficult decision - she enjoyed her work as a Ranger, and it was completely different from what she’d be doing on the Warlord. As a Ranger she saved people in the wreckage of Port Rush, searched for old research bunkers on the island of Haven Shore, or kept watch over cultivation crews as they picked fruit in the jungle, for a start. There were large carnivorous cats with glinting eyes, and curious monkeys who would steal from the pickers’ bags if they got too close. There were many other dangers as well, snakes, nests of widow beetles, and so on, but monkeys and big cats were the most problematic. The Warlord seemed so much more confining, but she knew she’d see new ports, aliens she’d only heard about, and there would be combat – it was guaranteed.

  The notion that she’d just done her last run as a ranger for weeks, maybe months, maybe ever, was just sinking in as the main Haven Shore settlement came into view. Her fighter slowed as she neared the new docking facility. The settlement took advantage of the hard, time-tested cliff face. Many small landing platforms and the framing of several buildings were anchored into the side of the stone. Atop the cliff was the port building proper, a bulbous, irregular dome that was still under construction. Parts of the main lower levels were finished, but the skin of the dome would be stretched upwards and expanded as more floors were added. They still used a much smaller building as the main port hub. It was a simple transparent dome that would be repurposed as an outbuilding later.

  The Everin building was well on its way to being completed, and even though it was massive to Alice, she knew there were plans for several more, and they’d be interconnected by a larger framing structure. The hollow structure was already large enough to house everyone who had arrived with them at Haven Shore; even she had an apartment there. Haven Shore Navnet took control of her Ramiel fighter and guided it towards the centre of the Everin building.

  The ship descended into the hollow centre of the structure. The twenty-one storey building seemed squat from above, but she couldn’t help but marvel at its size as her ship was led to a soft landing halfway down the hollow centre on a small retractable landing pad. Freeground technology, fabrication systems from the Triton, and mountains of supplies that Ayan and her people bartered for went into the quickly constructed building. A large amount of basic supplies came from the Warlord as well, sort of smuggled through the Triton so the Carthans didn’t object to Haven Shore taking aid from an exiled ship.

  The blue and green tinted floors and walls were once sheets of cloth and viscous liquid. Using nanotechnology and magnetic fields, the place was shaped wall by wall, room by room, and the materials hardened into light but incredibly strong structures. The Everin Building wasn’t so much built as it was shaped. It was still a shell for the most part, with only bare rooms and the most basic amenities, but when it was finished, it would be fully modern. The small vehicle bay in the bottom level of her apartment would deliver her fighter to a central area where it would be serviced, then it would be returned using Haven Shore’s transportation system, which would extend to every floor of the building through branching passa
ges and lifts.

  Alice climbed from her fighter as the landing platform retracted into her apartment. She was already planning how she’d get to the beach. There were always people heading in that direction on skid trucks, especially before high tide. Two thirds of the long beach would disappear as Kambis and its other moons’ gravity focused on their side of Tamber.

  She dropped her ranger kit in the middle of her small gathering room – a space she hadn’t had a chance to fill with more than a couple of portable chairs – and checked herself in the mirror. After a moment of trying to get her hair into a manageable pile and adding a little makeup, she gave up and headed for the door.

  Thoughts of leaving Haven Shore and her situation of increasing comforts were fading as she started looking through swimsuit shapes for her vacsuit. She was already smiling at the idea of the beach trip and relaxing with friends for the first time in two weeks. Ashley would be on the beach with Zoe, and several of the rangers Alice trained with were already there expecting her. Her eagerness faded as she opened her door and saw a young man sitting beside it, nodding off.

  He got to his feet with a start. He was wearing a yellow and white worker’s vacsuit, and was barely out of his teens. It took a moment for her to recognize Soren, one of the ranger trainees who left training after a week and a half. He was savvy with technology, but couldn’t keep up physically, and hesitated in mock combat. “Alice, I’m sorry for coming here like this, but you weren’t on Crewcast, everything just went to your mail.” He looked absolutely distraught.

  “Rangers turn social mode off while we’re on patrol,” Alice said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Right, I forgot, that’s procedure, I forgot, sorry. I would have brought this to the Council Office’s attention, and I know they’d send a ranger to take care of it, or maybe even just normal Haven Shore security, but I wanted you. I mean, I know you from training, and I think you’d,” he stammered, “maybe you could take care of this?”

  “Just take your time, I’ll help if I can,” Alice said, leading him into her apartment.

  “Okay,” he said, taking in the small main room. The privacy seemed to calm him down a little. “You could use some furniture.”

  “Tell me about it,” Alice replied. “Your problem?”

  “Yeah, well, when I washed out from the rangers I applied for a position in robotics, and I didn’t think I’d get it because my scores as a ranger trainee were bad at best, but mostly incomplete. They didn’t care. I got a spot on a team working on making network detached helper and builder bots out of the ones we bought for next to nothing on the mainland.”

  “I’ve seen a bunch working, those little skitters that follow the workers around,” Alice said.

  “Yeah, they’re working out great, even with some of the weird stuff that’s been going on. A lot of us anthropomorphise bots when we’re working on them, talk to them like people or kids who came in with a scraped knee or something even before we’ve switched them back on. It makes the day go by, and it’s pretty funny when we catch each other doing it, but some of the bots started really reacting to it after the lights go on.”

  “That’s normal, isn’t it? The bots have to acknowledge that you’re communicating with them.”

  “No, no, not like that. Not a little beep or a flashing light telling me I’ve been heard. I’m talking about whole conversations that, when you look at the bigger picture, indicate that these bots are more aware than anyone expected. The other day we got a call from a lady who was wondering if a skitter was assigned to follow her eight year old around when it was between tasks. We checked it out and found Bo-Bot, a skitter who this kid liked, named, and the sentiment seemed mutual. When we checked a snapshot of its code, we found out that this skitter noticed Hamish, the kid, was really accident prone while it was working in their quarters, and it took responsibility because he tripped over a temporary data line. We tried to remove Bo-Bot from the situation and the thing started, well, screaming at us until the kid started crying, then it summons his mother and makes these soothing noises that none of us added to its programming.”

  “It cared about him,” Alice said.

  “Yeah, and it’s not supposed to, not at all. It’s not supposed to learn things about babysitting kids, about helping around the house – which this skitter was doing – it’s not supposed to care if someone gives it a nickname, but Bo-Bot stencilled its nickname onto itself. We checked the code again and found more than we bargained for, that’s for sure. This skitter is the extreme example, these construction bots aren’t adopting kids throughout the building, thank God, but they are learning and picking up characteristics. Most of this stuff helps them work more efficiently, even form teams with pretty serious bonds, but some of it is just not necessary. They’re working faster, more efficiently though, so even the project managers want to leave it alone. I wonder if their tune will change when we find a depressed loader somewhere, or a skitter who wants to be a starship when he grows up.”

  “You want me to help you with some sketchy bots?” Alice asked. There were only two hours of good beach time left, and he was rambling.

  “No, I’m just giving you some history so you can get where this problem comes from.”

  “Oh, okay. What happened to Bo-Bot, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s now property of Hamish McCrary when the kid’s awake. At bedtime he gets back to work. We’re hoping that doesn’t become a thing with these bots, but our admins say this’ll be great for public relations,” he replied. “Anyway, these distinct personalities are forming in bots because of some kind of antivirus someone added to their base code. This isn’t the antivirus we installed, it’s something a lot more elaborate, maybe even elegant. We didn’t see it at first, but it’s in all our software now. It spreads like a virus, but once it’s in something, it’s like an antivirus against the Holocaust Virus and everything like it. The personalities these bots are taking on are harmless, all basic directives and programming still applies, so we’ve been letting it go on. For example, if I wanted Bo-Bot to return to duty and ignore Hamish, he would, and he’d be as good as ever at his job. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it.”

  “Something’s gone wrong,” Alice said, dreading what would come next. Anything involving the Holocaust Virus meant the worst kind of trouble.

  “Yeah, but only one other tech and I know about it, so I told her to sit tight while I bring this to you. If we report this to the Council, they’ll shut down all robotics and investigate. The Everin Building is almost finished, and the bots are supposed to move on to building the permanent port this week. The work that’s left here would take months if humans did it, and the port building? Without robotics it would take years.”

  “I’m sure your admins would keep it quiet if they could. There’s no way they’d want the bots shut down if they could help it.”

  “I might get fired for not reporting it sooner, and I don’t want to get put out of Haven Shore with the referendum coming up,” he replied, some of his initial desperation showing itself. “You’ve seen the world out there? It’s chaos in most cities and expensive everywhere else. I’ve even heard rumours of cannibalism in the Yellow Hook Plain.”

  “They only exile people from Haven Shore for murder and repeated offenses, and failure to report a problem like this is nowhere near, unless something went berserk and killed someone because you told it to?” Alice asked.

  “No, but three bots, advanced android Ando-Twelve types, ran off. They look just like humans, so they got around perimeter security. They’re in the middle of the jungle as far as I can tell, and they took a high powered EMP pistol from our emergency supplies.”

  “They didn’t hurt anyone on their way out?”

  Soren shook his head. “No, but I think all this has something to do with their wireless systems. We didn’t want to take the hours we’d need to disable them before turning them on. Ando-Twelves’ wireless systems are nested in their main processor clusters, so you need to dir
ect nanobots to disconnect the wireless in thousands of places. That used to make them highly connected and quick to respond to changing situations, great for assistant or critical care bots, but with the Holocaust Virus and that other thing out there, it could be bad.”

  “So you were going to let them run around with their wireless on?” Alice asked.

  “Nope. The fastest way to disable the wireless on an Ando is to ask them to do it themselves, but they have to be on first.”

  “Gotcha. Why do you think they left and the other bots didn’t?”

  “Have you ever met an Ando-Twelve?” Soren asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Alice replied.

  “That’s the thing; they’re sophisticated synthetic humans, expensive, used for the care and hospitality industries. You’ve probably met a few and not even known it. We thought they’d be safe androids because they’re hard-wired pacifists, the Holocaust Virus just shut most of them down.”

  “But it didn’t send them running like this?” Alice asked.

  “No. They just couldn’t violate their core directives, so they powered down, or fried their own power systems if they couldn’t do that. I don’t know what this new antivirus is doing to them, though. And I can’t communicate with any of them to find out, either. Please don’t turn us in. This is the best job I’ve had, and it’s been great here ever since we got out of those storage containers. It’s even better than how I was living before the Virus.”

  “I’ll do some tracking for you, but I’m going to report these bots as rogue eventually,” Alice said. “If they’re harmless, then I might be able to file something about them just going for a walk thanks to some bad code.”

  “That’s perfect, thank you.”

  “If,” she emphasised, “this is all harmless. I can’t make promises.” She picked up her ranger kit and holstered her sidearm. “Stay here while I track your bots down, I’ll tell you before I file my report.”